The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (38 page)

But Bergman had reached a crisis and she now proceeded to go to the stake in public. In fact, this icon of public love had had many affairs—with photographer Robert Capa, with Victor Fleming, and with harmonica-player Larry Adler. She approached Roberto Rossellini full of admiration. The result was her refugee wife wretched on
Stromboli
(50), and the birth of a child. The scandal in America was as contrived as her reception ten years before had been absurd. After a divorce from her husband, she married Rossellini and they went on to make
Europa ’51
, an episode from
Siamo Donne, Viaggio in Italia
(53),
Giovanna d’Arco al Rogo
(54)—based on Claudel’s play with music by Honegger—and
Angst
(54). Her performances in these films are, in fact, rather distant, if only because Rossellini does not make intense demands on actors. But the films are commentaries on Bergman and Rossellini as befits the cinema’s most unhistrionic documentarist. The first two, at least, are masterpieces—but did Bergman understand them? In any event, the films were largely unshown in America and—as the films themselves describe—the marriage came to an end. But Bergman was rescued by another master, Jean Renoir, who made
Eléna et les Hommes
(56), the only genuinely lyrical film that this “girl of nature” ever appeared in.

The rest is turgid. Hollywood reclaimed the prodigal grotesquely in
Anastasia
(56, Anatole Litvak) and gave her a second Oscar to go with the one for
Gaslight
(it is to be hoped they were kept in different rooms). After that, she married again and became distinctly staid. Her films were a sad aftermath of turbulent youth:
Indiscreet
(57, Stanley Donen);
The Inn of the Sixth Happiness
(58, Mark Robson);
Goodbye Again
(61, Litvak);
The Visit
(64, Bernard Wicki);
The Yellow Rolls-Royce
(64, Anthony Asquith); in an episode from
Stimulantia
(67, reunited with Molander);
Cactus Flower
(69, Gene Saks);
A Walk in the Spring Rain
(69, Guy Green);
Murder on the Orient Express
(74, Sidney Lumet); and
A Matter of Time
(76, Vincente Minnelli). She played a concert pianist in
Autumn Sonata
(78, Ingmar Bergman)—a long-awaited union with her namesake, a brilliant but chill performance in a calculated picture that drew directly upon her own struggle between career and family.

Her final performance came on television as the Israeli Prime Minister in
A Woman Called Golda
(82, Alan Gibson).

Bergman’s children include Pia Lindstrom, the show business writer, and Isabella Rossellini, actress and model.

Busby Berkeley
(William Berkeley Enos) (1895–1976), b. Los Angeles
1933:
She Had to Say Yes
. 1935:
Gold Diggers of 1935; Bright Lights; I live for Love
. 1936:
Stage Struck
. 1937:
The Go-Getter; Hollywood Hotel
. 1938:
Men Are Such Fools; Garden of the Moon; Comet Over Broadway
. 1939:
They Made Me a Criminal; Babes in Arms; Fast and Furious
. 1940:
Forty Little Mothers; Strike Up the Band
. 1941:
Blonde Inspiration; Babes on Broadway
. 1942:
For Me and My Gal
. 1943:
The Gang’s All Here
. 1946:
Cinderella Jones
. 1949:
Take Me Out to the Ball Game
.

It is a delicious irony that as the cinema institutionalized its own morality—in the early 1930s—it promoted a visionary who made films (or directed sequences) that revealed once and for all, despite every reference to the moon in June/boy meets girl/love and marriage, that the cinema had a ready, lascivious disposition toward orgy. Sexual daydream had found its medium, and Busby Berkeley’s was the cool gaze that made an endlessly flowering O in those Warner Brothers dance routines. As Jean Comolli argued, Berkeley

is not a choreographer: people do not dance in his films, they evolve, they move about, they make a circle, the circle tightens or is released, bursts forward and forms again. The syntactical unit of this ballet of images is not the pas de deux but the pas de mille, the dance of a thousand. And one can suspect Busby Berkeley of having given himself the ballet as an alibi for his mad frenzy— … to show in all possible fashions, in all situations and playing all parts, the largest possible number of uniformly dressed blonde girls, in the splendor of an impeccable alignment of their legs, making love in all the fan of poses with a shameless camera that forces the imagination to the point of passing, dollying in, under the arch of their thighs stretched out infinitely, forming a tunnel of dreams where it was desirable, once at least, that the cinema be engulfed.

The point is well made: Berkeley was more a dance director than a director—for all that
They Made Me a Criminal
is a solid John Garfield vehicle. Berkeley was a lyricist of eroticism, the high-angle shot, and the moving camera; he made it explicit that when the camera moves it has the thrust of the sexual act with it. It is only remarkable that some viewers smile on what they consider the “period charm” of such libertinage. We betray Berkeley by patronizing him, for he was daring enough to give us unalloyed cinematic sensation, as in the imperceptible plot of
The Gang’s All Here
, which contains in its opening sequence one of cinema’s most breathtaking traveling shots and, at its conclusion, the endlessly erectile banana routine—lewdness has never been as merry. And where else, in 1934, was surrealism purveyed to so many as in the ostrich feather dance of
Fashions of 1934
that ends in the orgasmic fronds of a sea anemone and a swan-galley of slave girls on a heaving canvas ocean?

As an official dance director, he worked on
Whoopee
(30, Thornton Freeland);
Kiki
(31, Sam Taylor);
Palmy Days
(31, Edward Sutherland);
Flying High
(31, Charles Reisner);
Night World
(32, Hobart Henley);
Bird of Paradise
(32, King Vidor);
The Kid from Spain
(32, Leo McCarey);
42nd Street
(33, Lloyd Bacon);
Gold Diggers of 1933
(33, Mervyn Le Roy);
Footlight Parade
(33, Bacon);
Roman Scandals
(33, Frank Tuttle);
Wonder Bar
(34, Bacon);
Fashions of 1934
(34, William Dieterle);
Twenty Million Sweethearts
(34, Ray Enright);
Dames
(34, Enright);
Go Into Your Dance
(35, Archie Mayo);
In Caliente
(35, Bacon);
Stars Over Broadway
(35, William Keighley);
Gold Diggers of 1937
(36, Bacon);
Singing Marine
(37, Enright);
Varsity Show
(37, Keighley);
Gold Diggers in Paris
(38, Enright);
Broadway Serenade
(39, Robert Z. Leonard);
Ziegfeld Girl
(41, Norman Z. McLeod);
Lady Be Good
(41, McLeod);
Born to Sing
(41, Edward Ludwig);
Girl Crazy
(43, Norman Taurog);
Two Weeks—With Love
(50, Roy Rowland);
Call Me Mister
(51, Bacon);
Two Tickets to Broadway
(51, James V. Kern);
Billion Dollar Mermaid
(52, Le Roy);
Small Town Girl
(53, Leslie Kardos);
Easy to Love
(53, Charles Walters);
Rose Marie
(54, Le Roy); and
Billy Rose’s Jumbo
(62, Walters).

It is notable that his Warners films are more downright suggestive than most of the films made after his move to MGM in 1939.
The Gang’s All Here
is a surrealist escape, but at Warners he kept a lofty survey over lagoons of water-lily vaginas opening and closing with delirious facility. At MGM, he had to abide by the unambiguous view of teenagers impersonated by Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland: Innuendo and the O were beaten out of doors by Mr. Mayer and his prim lion.

Paul Bern
(Levy) (1889–1932), b. Wandsbek, Germany
Nothing will ever alter the fact that Paul Bern is known for a scandal—though his tragedy was much eclipsed by the fame of his widow. In the summer of 1932, very soon after their marriage, Paul Bern was shot dead in the Hollywood Hills home he was hoping to share with Jean Harlow. Suffice it to say that MGM studio people (Louis B. Mayer and Howard Strickling) were on the site before the police or a coroner. Still, the rumors were unbeatable, and they were fueled by a note found in the house, in Bern’s hand: “Dearest dear. Unfortunately this is the only way to make good the frightful wrong I have done you and to wipe out my abject humiliation. Paul. You understand that last night was only a comedy.”

There were stories told that Harlow had shot Bern, after he had beaten her. Another said he was a suicide, driven to it by his inability to make love to his wife. Some argued that the note was written by, or improved by, Mayer. We will never know for sure, but the best and latest research (by Sam Marx and David Stenn) suggests that Bern was shot by a prior wife (Dorothy Millette), who later killed herself.

What’s really far more interesting is how and why Harlow, twenty-one, ravishing and a sexpot, married Bern, who was twice her age, balding, a little tubby, and very shy. It’s worth taking in the testimony of Irene Mayer Selznick, who knew both of them well: she said that Bern was “probably the single most beloved figure in Hollywood.… He was the only person I ever knew who cherished people he loved as much for their frailties as for their virtues. He had compassion, erudition, and great generosity.… He was a writer who became a director, then a producer, but he was more concerned with nurturing the talent of others.”

He did have credits, though they are not overpowering. I suspect that he was a fine advisor to filmmakers more than the possessor of real talent. As such, he became a right-hand man to Irving Thalberg. But Bern was tender towards talent, and smart enough to be genuinely sympathetic and useful. Amid all the very uneasy egos of Hollywood, that kind of personality has always had a place. Bern may have risen beyond his level—he seemed so kind and helpful to the raw Harlow that she thought marriage was necessary. It wasn’t, and it may have exposed Bern’s sexual voyeurism—a man more pleasured by being with stars than by making love to them. I doubt that he was gay so much as a chronic onlooker (with dark secrets to his own life).

So just as his story may never die, his type goes on. He is to be remembered whenever you see, and puzzle over, the clearly intelligent, endlessly patient, and oddly deferential men who are to be found in the retinues of our great and appalling young stars.

Trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, Bern had worked in the theatre before entering movies. He did scripts for
Women Men Forget
(20, John M. Stahl);
Suspicious Wives
(22, Stahl);
The Christian
(23, Maurice Tourneur);
Lost and Found on a South Sea Island
(23, Raoul Walsh);
The Wanters
(23, Stahl);
Name the Man
(24, Victor Sjöström);
The Marriage Circle
(24, Ernst Lubitsch);
The Great Deception
(26, Howard Higgin);
The Beloved Rogue
(27, Alan Crosland);
The Dove
(28, Roland West).

Curtis
(Kurt)
Bernhardt
(1899–1981), b. Worms, Germany
1926:
Qualen der Nacht; Die Waise von Lowood
. 1927:
Kinderseelen Klagen Au Das Mädchen mit den Fünf Nullen; Schinderhannes
. 1928:
Die Letzte Fort
. 1929:
Die Frau Nach der Man Sich Sehnt
. 1930:
Die Letzte Kompanie; L’Homme qui Assassina
. 1931:
Der Mann der den Mord Beging
. 1932:
Der Rebell
(codirected with Luis Trenker). 1933:
Der Tunnel; L’Or dans la Rue
. 1936:
The Beloved Vagabond
. 1938:
Carrefour; The Girl in the Taxi
. 1939:
Nuit de Decembre
. 1940:
My Love Came Back; The Lady With Red Hair
. 1941:
Million Dollar Baby
. 1942:
Juke Girl
. 1943:
Happy Go Lucky
. 1945:
Conflict
. 1946:
Devotion; My Reputation; A Stolen Life
. 1947:
Possessed
. 1948:
The High Wall
. 1949:
The Doctor and the Girl
. 1951:
Payment on Demand; Sirocco; The Blue Veil
. 1952:
The Merry Widow
. 1953:
Miss Sadie Thompson
. 1954:
Beau Brummel
. 1955:
Interrupted Melody
. 1956:
Gaby
. 1960:
Stephanie in Rio
. 1961:
Damon and Pythias
. 1964:
Kisses for My President
.

An actor first, and then a director of plays in Berlin, Bernhardt went into films casually but soon established himself sufficiently to be given one of the first German sound films:
Die Letzte Kompanie
. After being arrested by the Gestapo, in 1934 he went to France and in 1935 to England where he also produced
The Dictator
(35, Alfred Santell and Victor Saville). He returned to France, but in early 1940 he reached America under contract to Warners. By 1950, he was freelancing and his work went into a steady decline—to the dull from the odd. Bernhardt is a slight talent, best at what he called “a certain romantic, brooding mood.” Some of his German silents touch on that:
Die Waise von Lowood
is a version of
Jane Eyre; Der Mann der den Mord Beging
is a thriller set in Constantinople, starring Conrad Veidt, “with eternal danger behind it, and beautiful women, and elegance.”